Last Updated on June 25, 2021 by

Imagine yourself slowly sipping a fantastic wine, the aromas that leap out of the glass as you swirl the wine, and the picturesque view as look out over the vineyard. Life doesn’t get much better.

Whether it’s on vacation or at a local winery, it’s these moments that make your customers wish they had the power to freeze time. While times like these are etched in your customers’ memory for a long time, they don’t last forever.

As a winery, how do you build and maintain a lasting wine memory with your customers or members that will keep them coming back for more? How do you stand out and provide an experience that differentiates your winery from any other last-minute wine-tasting excursion? The answer, Email Marketing. 

While most winery marketing directors know or have heard of email marketing, very few of them know how to use it to grow and engage with their audience, customers, or club members.

Through a strategic email marketing for wineries campaign, winery owners can remind their members of their favorite experiences. A well-designed email marketing campaign will not only inspire customers to buy their favorite bottles but will attract them back to your vineyard like a moth to a flame.

Growing your list of subscribers is only half the battle, to win the war, you must nurture and engage them so that whenever your winery’s name comes up, they’ll be flooded with memories and emotion.

We’ll be sharing with you the exact tips, tricks, resources, and tools we use at Barrels Ahead to improve our winery client’s ROI. But first, let’s make sure we are all on the same page when we talk about email marketing.

Email Marketing for Wineries 101

Whenever you hear online marketers talking about an email marketing campaign, they’re usually referring to the sequence of emails businesses use to talk to subscribers including, prospects and customers.

The series of emails are well-thought-out and designed to persuade subscribers to engage with your winery. They are a pillar of every successful inbound marketing campaign and help you take them on a journey that leads to conversion.

While occasionally sending emails to your subscriber list whenever you’re in the mood, or have time, is better than sending none at all, it doesn’t qualify as an email marketing campaign here at Barrels Ahead.

You need to send out a bare minimum of three emails sequentially, and the time interval between each email should be no more than two weeks to call it a campaign. Here’s a great example of an event-driven (anniversary) email marketing campaign:

• 1st email: Relive Your Big Day with Our Latest Pinot Noir (send two weeks to D-day)
• 2nd email: Save 10% on the Perfect Anniversary Gift (send one week to D-day)
• 3rd Email: Limited Time Offer to Save 10% for Wine for Your Anniversary is Expiring Soon. (send 48 hours to D-day)

Why Email Marketing is still relevant

A quick search on Google on email marketing, and you’ll find quite several email marketing doomsayers proclaiming that it’s dead or dying. The demise of email couldn’t be further from the truth.

There are currently more than 3.8 billion email users, and experts project the number to grow to 4.3 billion by 2022. According to this report by Radicati, more than 128.8 billion business emails were received and sent in 2019 with consumer emails following closely behind at 117.7 billion.

With these types of numbers, one thing is clear; email marketing is far from dead or dying. It remains one of the most effective and efficient methods for wineries to start a conversation and engage with their members or prospects.

Talk on a one-on-one basis with prospects

While email shares a lot of similarities with push notifications such as SMS, people react differently when they receive an email versus a text. Here’s the thing, with a text message, consumers expect it to be something essential, and it requires them to take a specific action quickly.

With email, people are more laid back.

Subscribers know email is essential; after all, they signed up for it, but they also know it isn’t as urgent, so they don’t get irritated by it compared to receiving an unimportant push notification.

Email provides a unique opportunity for wineries to reach one of their customers or prospects and talk to them on a one-on-one basis without setting them off.

At Barrels Ahead, we help winery owners use email marketing to grow and nurture their subscriber base by providing highly valuable and relevant information that will help them reach their goals.

Target Warm Leads

Compared to media buying, i.e. Pay Per Click marketing campaigns where ads are shown to prospects who may have or may not have interacted with your business, email marketing targets warm leads.

These are people who decided to subscribe to your newsletter when they visited your website or winery or bought from your online store.

If done correctly, wineries can build a solid list of loyal customers who not only buy from you but also act as brand ambassadors promoting your products whenever the occasion arises. Having a subscriber list of warm leads puts your winery miles ahead of the competition, that is because:

• They gave you their information so you can personalize your campaigns—more on that later.
• By subscribing, they’ve already shown interest in your wine collection
• Email marketing automation gives you full control over your campaign so you can control which subscribers receive your emails, what time they receive it, and how often they are contacted.

Maximize ROI while minimizing ad spend

While there are a plethora of other online marketing channels with innovations springing up like mushrooms, e.g. social and messenger, email marketing is still one of the best ways of engaging with your audience on a one-on-one basis.

It’s such a dominant engagement channel that more and more wineries are adopting email as part of their inbound marketing campaigns, if you haven’t started, then it’s time you should. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg; the main reason email has grown in popularity is because of its consistently positive ROI.

It is estimated that businesses can make an average of $42 for every dollar spent on email marketing campaigns, according to this report. As many benefits as email marketing provides, the return on investment is by far the most attractive to wineries among other industries.

Email Marketing Automation – Key touchpoints in the customer buying journey.  

As the owner of a winery, you’ve already got your hands full with tending to the vineyard, bottling, and maintaining a tasting room. After all that, you still need to market and promote your bottles. Marketing is a whole new mountain you need to conquer.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go at it alone. After helping multiple wineries grow their subscribers’ list and, subsequently, their sales, we know a thing or two about running highly successful email marketing campaigns.

But to do this efficiently and effectively, we rely on a handful of tools such as ActiveCampaign—we’ll get into it, later on, to help us automate some of the more tedious and mundane tasks.

Evaluating parameters such as open rate, click-through rate, running A/B split tests, creating triggers, remembering birthdays, anniversaries, segmenting users, etc. may be easy with just a handful of subscribers. But, when you scale your list to the thousands, it becomes a headache in itself.

That’s why we recommend adopting email marketing automation to streamline your campaigns. There’s no better way of meticulously reaching, conversing, and engaging with your audience than email.

How does email marketing automation work?

Triggers are the lynchpin to every successful winery marketing automation system. You should set up triggers and links to your winery’s website and online store if it’s separate from your website.

One of the most common triggers is the abandoned cart trigger. This trigger sends an email to a prospect if they added products to their shopping cart and left before checking out.

The main goal of abandoned cart triggers is to get the person to return to your store and complete their purchase. Some of the common subject lines used in abandoned cart emails include:

• “Oops, did you forget something?” or
• “Get 15% off when you complete your order now” or
• “You don’t want to miss out on a fabulous bottle.”

When done correctly, the abandoned cart email can be a great way of recovering sales. However, in many cases, we would argue a single abandoned cart email is not the most effective strategy. 

That’s why here at Barrels Ahead, we encourage our winery clients to use triggers to start a conversation with their members. We’ve found the most effective way for wineries to nurture their communities and build a lasting relationship with their members is by maximizing every touchpoint in their customers’ journey.

One way of doing this is through recipes; most wineries provide methods that are complementary to their recent shipments to wine club members.

By requiring members to log in to your website to view and download these recipes, you’ll be able to learn and customize your conversation based on how they interact with your website. You also add links to download these recipes in your quarterly email when notifying members of upcoming wine shipments.

Once members click through the link to the recipe download page, their data is collected, allowing wine marketing directors to subsequently send an email to them to find out if they enjoyed the recipe.

This touchpoint is an excellent opportunity to ask them to leave a review as well as share tips other members might find useful when trying out the recipe. As simple as these steps may sound, they’re an effective way of building an engaged community that will keep your brand name at the top of their heads.

If they leave a review, then be sure to follow up with a “Thank You” email and perhaps offer a discount for their next purchase. There’s a good chance they enjoyed your bottle, and by using these triggers in the touchpoints of your customers’ journey, you can make sure members don’t lose interest.

Here are some of the other touchpoints you will want to capitalize on in your email marketing automation sequences:

New Subscriber

Whenever a prospect signs up to become a subscriber, they expect you to remain in touch with them, and the emails you send them should be an accurate reflection of your brand’s image. A successful email automation campaign for new subscribers should send the welcome email right off the bat.

It should welcome them to your mailing list and serve as an informal introduction to your winery brand.

Considering that welcome emails have been shown to have an open rate of 86%–which is much higher than that of regular emails, it’s about time you maximized on this opportunity to connect with your members.

The welcome email campaign for your new subscribers is often the first point of contact you have with your audience. They give you their email in exchange for offering a particular incentive. It could be a free report, PDF, eBook or even a discount coupon which you provide.

These type of campaigns helps build rapport with prospects who’ve just discovered your winery’s brand, and it provides a unique opportunity to convert them into paying customers not only subscribers.

New Retail Customer

Your welcome email campaign for a new retail customer is just as important, if not more, as your new subscriber email. It’s a critical first step in building a lasting relationship with your new customer, and you’d be surprised how often wine marketing directors overlook it.

Do not skip this step. The post-purchase thank you email is your chance to communicate brand value, nurture your community, promote brand awareness, and convert your subscribers into loyal brand ambassadors.

The first thing you need to do is get into the minds of your customers and understand where they’re coming from. Most customers have had at least one lousy shopping experience online so they’re always keeping an eye out for any red flags to jump ship.

Your subscribers’ previous bad experiences put your winery in a precarious position.

On the one hand, if you fail to deliver or come up short, then it’s highly likely that they’ll never purchase from you again. On the other hand, if you go above and beyond to deliver a truly personalized shopping experience, then you might convert them into lifelong customers.

Some of the questions your new customer wants to be answered by this email sequence include:

• How soon will their wine bottle ship out?
• When will they receive their order?
• What kind of return policies do you have?

You could even take it a step further and recommend closely related products—emphasis on closely related, so you don’t come across as too pushy or salesy.

New Wine Club Member

How you introduce your customers to your wine club membership is an essential first step in creating a lasting first impression. That’s why we recommend you put a lot of thought into crafting the perfect wine club membership welcome email so you can engage and properly bring new members into the fold.

It’s one of the easiest ways of improving your bottom line; it helps emphasize the value they’re getting from signing up to your wine club.

Don’t forget, new members have taken a considerable step signing up and they expect you to match their level of enthusiasm and excitement. Among the few things members expect from your emails include:

• It has to be personalized; don’t go sending an email addressed to “Dear member” that’s a no-no.
• Send a sincere thank you
• Reiterate what they’re getting from being a member of your wine club
• Encourage them to get back to you if they’ve got more questions
• Provide a brief tour of your winery’s website or vineyard
• If you have an upcoming event, then be sure to mention it and invite them to attend

New Wine Release

One of the best ways of generating sales without increasing your ad spend is to use the product launch email formula. It refers to a series of emails you send to your mailing list to inform and tell them about your new product; for wineries, this would be your new releases.

The goal here is not to shove your new wine release down the throat of your customers but to stir up emotion and excitement around your new product.

It’s worth noting that you can’t do all of this using a single email to your subscribers but through a series of well-crafted emails designed to drive conversions. Every successful wine release campaign should be done in three main stages:

• Prepare: this involves everything from surveying your current subscribers to gauge interest in building landing pages for your new wine to gathering reviews and testimonials from your beta group.
• Drop a hint: after your initial preparations, it’s time to let your subscribers know about your new product offering. Share your wine release news with your wine club members and incentivize it using a special discount, early-bird access. And don’t forget to send your coming soon email a few days before launching.
• The big reveal: this is the final step of marketing automation where you officially launch your big red. It’s the easiest of the three, but to succeed, you need to make sure everything is done just right, from your subject line to images to Call-to-Actions to your copy.

Private Flash Sales

Everyone loves a good deal. From your suppliers to your customers, it’s the one thing that cuts across all industries; that’s why a huge jolt of lightning strokes your spine every time you get an email notification offering significant savings, shipping included, and a limited time offer.

Those three elements make up the much-coveted triple crown of a successful private flash sale. For those of you not already familiar with flash sales, it refers to a period wherein an online store such as a winery offers significant promotions or discounts for a limited time only.

Think Black Friday or CyberMonday but even better. Instead of offering your products for a day or an extended period, most flash sales are limited to only a couple of hours. They are designed to sell surplus, increase revenue, and drive impulse purchases.

There are four main stages to every successful private flash sale email marketing campaign:

• Make the announcement and don’t forget to include “Flash sale” in your subject line
• Launch your private flash sale; timing is crucial here
• The last call; this is where you notify subscribers your flash sale is ending soon
• The last day reminder; this is especially useful if your flash sale is running for a few days.

Don’t forget to update your list segments based on their reactions to the previous emails. It is very annoying for someone who just acted on the offer and purchased wine to receive another email asking them to buy the same wine. These generic emails degrade all the previous relationship building. To subscribers who already took advantage of the offer, thank them for their purchase and let them know they have one last chance to stock up.

Discounted Shipping

When it comes to promotional campaigns, whether offline or online, there’s no denying how effective a sale or discount can be in driving sales. In fact, according to this report, an estimated 93% of online shoppers use a discount code or coupon multiple times every year.

That means a vast majority of customers in your wine club memberships are looking for a good deal, and offering discounted shipping is one way of giving it. To be more accurate, every one of your customers loves the idea of getting a great deal—even if it isn’t a good deal.

That said, there isn’t a surefire formula for running a discounted shipping email marketing campaign. It takes a lot of experience, audience insights, product knowledge, and gut instinct to run a successful discounted shipping email campaign, and here at Barrels Ahead, we specialize in doing just that.

There are general guidelines you need to follow. For instance, offering discounted shipping on one-off products like a branded cork screw might not make sense financially but offering discounted shipping on a bundled deal of your best bottles—well, that might do the trick.

End of Vintage Sales

Scarcity plays a significant role when you want to add FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. That’s because it creates a massive sense of urgency, which acts as an incentive to buy.

For a winery, running an end of a vintage sales campaign is an excellent way of leveraging FOMO in your marketing campaign, but only if you do it correctly.

By giving your wine club members a timeline for getting that last vintage bottle or informing them that it’s about to run out, it pushes them from just considering to buying. It’s a strategy that uses simple psychology to generate more revenue, i.e. people don’t like missing out on an opportunity.

As a winery marketing director, you can increase urgency by including a countdown timer, promoting it only to your subscribers, and adding reviews and testimonials.

Adding these three elements in your winery marketing campaign induces a wanting mentality, sparking jealousy, and makes your customers want that vintage bottle even more.

Winery Newsletter

If you’re looking to promote brand awareness, inspire loyalty, and increase engagement, then creating a winery newsletter is the best way of doing it. It’s also a great avenue to spend your marketing dollars on thanks to its massive return on investment.

Because subscribers willingly signed up using your opt-in form to hear from you, that means they’re already interested in what you have to offer. Instead of marketing to a broad audience who may or may not be interested in wine, it lets you advertise to a warm audience.

Winery newsletters help you keep the conversation going because once a prospect hands over their email; you’ve got a virtually unlimited number of chances to connect with them. A well-crafted newsletter campaign can also act as a hub to redirect your customers to other resources or products on your site.

When done correctly, it will help you increase traffic to your store, grow your social following, and generate more revenue. But to reap these benefits, there are a few things you need to include:

• Craft a captivating headline
• Start with a brief introduction or summary
• Make it visually appealing with images
• Encourage subscribers to take action by adding a prominent CTA

Customer Birthdays

No other channel provides you with the level of marketing automation that email offers. What’s more, it’s easy to set up most email marketing automation platform to send out a series of emails at critical times throughout the year, for instance, winery club members’ birthdays.

Sadly, very few wine marketing directors do this. My wife and I are members of about six wine clubs (none of these wineries are current clients, though they should be). On my last birthday, not one of these wineries sent a birthday card, let alone happy birthday email wishes.

Not that I expected one, and then it hit me. What a perfect time to reach out to a member with a quick Happy birthday note or card or both, wishing them well and perhaps suggesting they celebrate with a bottle of wine from their last shipment.

Remember, the goal here is not to sell but to solidify the relationship. A wine club member’s birthday is just one key piece of data that you can leverage. There are other critical pieces of data that you can leverage even before you begin to build your knowledge of the member.

Customer Anniversary

Another often overlooked touchpoint most winery marketing automation campaigns don’t capitalize on is their customers’ anniversary. These special anniversaries and dates provide a unique opportunity for brands to strengthen their relationship with their customers.

Some of the dates that are worth marking the calendar might include the first anniversary since your customer subscribed to your mailing list or after they first bought from you, or when they visited your winery.

As a winery marketing director, you can leverage these dates and transform them into special occasions for your wine club members. Your customer may not even realize there’s anything worth celebrating, so a surprising limited release bottle allocation or discount coupon is usually much appreciated.

That said, be sure the email you send out to your club members focuses on rewarding them for being loyal customers and don’t push the sale. The anniversary automation campaign is designed to make it seamless for you to start a conversation with your subscribers on one of their special days.

It humanizes your winery brands, gives inactive subscribers a chance to re-engage with your brand, and it goes a long way in fostering brand loyalty and promoting advocacy.

Abandoned Cart

Shopping cart abandonment; no one likes it, but it’s part of the natural cycle of e-commerce.

Prospects give you their details, add some of your best reds to their basket, and then pull a Houdini. In fact, according to this report, the average rate of abandoned cart across popular e-commerce platforms is 67.57%.

But to be fair, a large portion of this percentage is part of the natural customer journey online—a majority of users save items to their wish list, compare prices, evaluating gift options, or are simply window shopping.

At Barrels Ahead, we’re a positive bunch. We like to think of cart abandonment as a second opportunity to engage with our prized prospects by using the abandoned cart email marketing campaign. That said, a common mistake we find winery marketers make is using only a single email in the hopes of recouping sales.

While a recent report by Business Insider estimates savvy marketers can recoup up to 63% of lost sales, it won’t happen unless you go beyond the single-email reminder. At Barrels Ahead, we craft efficient abandoned cart automation campaigns that will help you bring back those customers, in three stages:

• Stage 1: remind your prospects of what they’ve forgotten—send after a day
• Stage 2: Handle any objections your prospects may have—send after two days
• Stage 3: Still not getting conversion? Provide an incentive or discount to drive sales—send after three days

Customer re-engagement

The last email automation campaign we use for wineries is the customer re-engagement campaign, which, among marketing circles, is considered to be a Hail Mary. The re-engagement email campaign is designed to win back subscribers who are showing signs of jumping ship.

By jumping ship, we refer to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand for a while, i.e. they haven’t bought any of your wines in a long time.

It’s happened to the best of us; according to HubSpot, the average subscriber list naturally degrades by approximately 22.5% each year. That’s why your winery must have an effective “win-back” or re-engagement campaign to reignite that lost intent.

What’s more, according to this email re-engagement study, almost half of the otherwise inactive subscribers who received a re-engagement email opened it and subsequently became active subscribers. There are a variety of strategies you can use to craft these campaigns, but at Barrels Ahead, here’s how we do it:

• Start with an email reminder
• Offer them a meaningful discount for the next bottle they purchase
• If that doesn’t work, let them know that you will remove them from your mailing list
• When all else fails, it’s time to follow through by removing them from your automation campaign

While we’ve covered a majority of touchpoints you can use in your marketing automation campaign, they are by no means the only ones. That said, by capitalizing on these touchpoints, you’ll be able to turbocharge your marketing automation campaign to reach, converse, and better engage your audience.

Every Successful Marketing Automation Campaign Starts with Personalization

There’s no denying how effective personalization can be in your winery’s marketing automation campaign. The problem, however, is that most marketers use cookie-cutter personalization techniques in their campaigns, which are far from effective.

What most marketers fail to understand is that personalization involves a lot more than merely appending your customers’ names to the salutation of your email series. Don’t forget, as the owner of a winery, there is a good chance that you’ll be targeting more than one type of audience.

Generally speaking, most businesses, regardless of industry, develop services or products that appeal to more than one segment of the broader population. There’s a good chance your winery marketing campaign won’t reach your entire target audience, especially if you’re using the same message.

That’s why we recommend using personalization. This single email marketing best-practice has been shown to improve engagement dramatically, click-through rate, and email open rates while simultaneously reducing spam reports unsubscribes as well as email bounces.

To realize the full potential of personalization in winery marketing automation, you want to segment your audience and target each segment differently. Segmenting your subscriber list can help you narrow down to who you’re targeting and what matters to them.

Just because you’ve got more than a couple thousand subscribers on your list, doesn’t mean that everyone in your mailing list should know about every offer. In case it’s not already clear how valuable personalization is in winery marketing, here are a couple of statistics in favor of using personalization:

• Personalized emails, on average, have a 14% higher click-through rate and
• Get average open rates of more than 26% when compared to other automation campaigns

We recommend using the three R’s as a general rule of thumb when personalizing marketing automation campaigns, i.e.:

• Recognize the name of your subscribers
• Remember their recent wine shipments
• Provide highly relevant product recommendations

Remember, your customers already know or have heard of the power of personalization.  

More than half of them—56% to be exact, prefer purchasing from online retailers that can recognize them by their names. What’s more, 58% of customers reported buying from retailers that provide product recommendations based on their purchasing history.

Is merely recognizing your customer by name the best personalization has to offer? The short answer, No. Here are other ways you can incorporate personalization in your wine marketing campaign:

• Include your subscribers’ first name in your greeting or email subject line
• Be as specific as possible with the information you’re providing
• Email your subscribers content that’s highly relevant to whatever stage they are in your sales pipeline
• Send emails that are based on the last engagement your subscribers have had with your brand
• Don’t forget to remember select dates, anniversaries and birthdays
• Include a prominent call to action
• Sign off your email using a personal, more human, signature

Email marketing platforms: Marketing automation made easy

While marketing automation campaigns are useful in driving traffic, engagement, and increase sales, nearly all of them require you to leverage essential data points on your customers, and that’s where email marketing tools come in.

For instance, for you to set up triggers and winery marketing automation campaigns for customer’s birthdays and anniversaries, you need to have collected the demographic data on your subscribers.

That means collecting information on age, gender, location, etc. and store it in an email marketing platform. You should collect data on purchase history, on-site behavior, reviews, etc. to be able to run End of Vintage sales, new wine releases, abandoned cart, etc. email marketing campaigns.

Using a Band-Aid combination of spreadsheets and CRM to handle all of this is relatively easy when you have a handful of subscribers. However, when you scale the number of subscribers to a couple of thousand, then it becomes too difficult for you to pull, use, and update the information on your patchwork database.

Fortunately, you don’t have to thanks to email marketing tools that seamlessly integrate with your winery store, marketing software, and CRM.

These applications are designed to integrate and work seamlessly to make sure that data you need is always on hand and can be readily used to segment your subscribers as well as launch high-converting marketing automation campaigns.

At Barrels Ahead, we recommend using tools like ActiveCampaign and MailChimp to do the heavy lifting.

Overview of ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a CRM, marketing automation, and email marketing tool designed to help businesses, including wineries, create the perfect customer experience.

It handles your entire second funnel from start to finish. From helping you build awareness and intents to nurturing and educating your audience to convert and closing them and finally to supporting conversations and promoting growth.

If you’re looking to communicate brand value, then ActiveCampaign is one of the most effective ways of doing that. It doesn’t just create beautiful emails but helps you send extremely targeted messages to each of your contact lists based on their behavior.

From setting up welcome email campaigns using marketing automation to segmenting your subscribers, ActiveCampaign’s simple workflows make it extremely easy to automate marketing. And thanks to its CRM and marketing automation features, you can store and access all your subscribers’ data in one place.

Overview of MailChimp

Whether you’re a startup winery or a well-established one, MailChimp was created to help your business thrive. With MailChimp, you can create a truly customized experience for your subscribers at every stage of their journey.

It helps you consolidate your subscriber insights, marketing channels, and audience under one roof to help you achieve your goals that much faster. Because everything is in one place, you’ll be able to find out what works for ads, email, and messaging and capitalize on it to drive maximum results.

With over 300 integration options, MailChimp is a powerhouse for connectivity and comes with all the bells and whistles that make marketing automation a breeze. It also allows you to generate more traffic using multiple channels, including email, social, and Google.

With MailChimp, the focus is on your customers; after all, they’re the lifeblood of your business. Thanks to its feature-rich CRM, you’ll be able to collect data and gather insights about your mailing list and use this information to drive action in your marketing automation campaign.

At Barrels Ahead, we use both of the marketing automation tools to drive results. That said, they’re not the only email marketing automation platforms out there.

Email Marketing Best Practices

According to Seth Godin, solidifying your winery brand is all about setting the right expectations, building memories, relationships, and sharing stories. When you combine these elements, they influence your customer’s decision to choose your winery over your competitors.

Importance of Opt-ins

It’s essential to use opt-ins when growing your subscriber list because email is the primary channel you use to communicate with your customers. You do not want to compromise this channel. Using opt-ins to grow your subscriber base helps you build engaged lists and comply with usage laws or standards like GDPR and CAN-SPAM as well as avoid being blacklisted.

Segmenting your subscriber list

Segmenting your subscriber lists involves breaking it up or dividing it into sub-categories that are based on mailing lists’ unique preferences, interests, and characteristics. After all, your subscribers are human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such; that means don’t use generic email broadcasts.

For example, in a winery, you can segment your lists into white wine and red wine lovers based on their recent purchases or member shipment. Segmentation in marketing automation is crucial because your subscribers are in different stages of your sales funnel.

You don’t want to run the risk of losing potential customers because of mailing them the wrong content.

Dynamic Content

We’ve already discussed the importance of personalization and how brands can use it to build relationships and provide compelling interactions with their wine club membership. Personalization in email marketing has been shown to amplify transaction rates by up to six times, according to Experian.  

One of the best ways of turbocharging your personalization efforts is to use dynamic content. It allows you to customize your subscribers’ experience by showing them content based on their demographics, preferences, and email data, helping you engage with them in more meaningful ways.

Html vs Text-based emails

This is one debate that’s bound to spark a heated argument between digital marketers. Which is better for winery marketing between HTML and text-based emails? The answer isn’t as clear-cut as most marketers would have you believe.

Here’s the thing, they both have their uses cases. While HTML is better when sending marketing emails, text-based emails help provide that personal touch. That said, it’s always better to give your subscribers the option to choose text-based emails when subscribing.

At Barrels Ahead, we recommend mixing in text-based emails because they’re more accessible and have a higher response rate.

Emails to Increase Retention

As a winery owner, you know how important it is to maintain your customer base because it’s much harder to attract a new one. It’s been shown that your existing customers, on average, spend 31% more and are more likely to buy new products compared to new customers.

You must engage and keep the relationship with your wine club members alive for as long as possible.

That’s why it’s essential if you haven’t already, you start using emails to increase retention. These emails are designed to maximize the various touchpoints you have with your subscribers and include welcome, abandoned cart, anniversary, new wine release, among other email campaigns.

Bottom Line

Email is still one of the best marketing channels you can use to grow conversions in your winery and has been proven, time and again, to have a much better ROI compared to search and social campaigns.

These are just some of the strategies in which you can use in winery marketing to transform your winery from being a one-off wine-tasting destination into a great house special for subscribers.

At Barrels Ahead, we specialize in helping wineries like yours nurture their subscribers and ultimately grow sales and revenue. If you need help with your marketing automation campaign, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.  

Book a 15-minute discovery call. We can discuss how to take your email marketing to the next level.

We’ll go over suggestions and recommendations for your winery, and make sure that your customers fall in love with being a part of your club.